Elanor has had major sleep disruption lately. I chalked it up to vacation, to her grandparents being here, to anything and everything.

Several recent middle of the night wake ups have been particularly fun, the most recent being her 4:30am wake up screams on Sunday morning when I’d had trouble sleeping, and had gotten less than an hour of sleep, followed by her falling asleep on me in our bed for a few minutes at a time, kicking R and I, and my finally putting her to bed (with Sesame Street…hell I would’ve given her my engagement ring to shut her up at that point) around 6am. She finally went back to sleep and slept until noon (thankfully).

But on Friday something clicked for me…I’ve noticed her hands are in her mouth all the time. E has never been a thumb/finger sucker (she ditched her pacifier at 4 months, much to my dismay and the irritation of many a procedure nurse who wanted to give her sugar water as a soother on her pacifier only to find out she didn’t take one or my boob)…except when she’s teething. I managed to hold her down long enough to get a finger to the back of her mouth (and yes, was bitten several times and hard for my efforts) to discover little hard points starting to break through her gums.

Ah, the two year molars are arriving. Lovely.

I’ve read in many a parenting book that they are often the most painful of all teeth (E generally hasn’t had a lot of pain or fevers with teething–there was one really high fever with the first, one suspected ear ache that turned out to be teething and a few doses of tylenol here and there), but neither of us was really prepared for this kind of prolonged pain.

Friday night she went down without trouble but woke up around midnight crying. She was still tired, was unhappy to be up, and wasn’t feverish. I remembered the tylenol from her early teeth and decided to try the local equivalent (called paracetamol…it’s also acetometaphine). Everyone had a peaceful night.

Saturday night was the 4:30 wake up call. I thought about giving her paracetamol several times, but just didn’t have the energy to find the damn medicine, fill a syringe, and hold her down to give it to her. I probably would have been better off if I had.

Sunday night there was again just too much chewing on the hands, crying, and nonsense, so we gave her the med pre-emptively and she had a solid night of sleep.

I know most of you are in the same boat, age-wise as us (or younger!), but does anyone have any concrete stories of how long their kid went through this? I’m not in love with nightly doses of paracetamol (they mostly bother her at night, and that seems to be not unusual according to the googling I ‘ve done) but it would be nice to know if others were dealing with it for a few weeks, or months, or what…

On one hand, whatever. It’s not a big deal to give it to her, even longer term, but I do wonder how long this will last. Most of her teeth weren’t big deals in terms of pain/sleep loss/behavioral changes, but I do worry about how long this is going to go on.

One Response to Two year molars and sleep

Tylenol darling, it’s what I used. You can wrap icecubes into a washrag and rubberband it shut and let her chew on it but that scares me (what if the rubberband broke and she choked on it, what if the icecubes got out and she choked…see where I’m going there). Go back a couple generations, my folks rubbed blackberry brandy on my gums, close friend of mine’s parents rubbed whisky on his. Once the molars break through it’ll be fine. Sorry I couldn’t be more help.